When it comes to the success of your businesss website, many business owners skip over the vital factor of website speed and jump right to the basics- high quality content, easy navigation and inbound links. While all of these are absolutely necessary for your businesss online success, website speed cannot be something to ignore.
User Experience is the Top Priority
The main goal of any small business website is to provide customers with information and a positive impression of your company. When your website is slow, customers get frustrated and may even leave your website, which means that your company didnt accomplish either of its goals; the customer didnt get the information he/she was looking for, and you probably didnt give him a positive impression of your company, either.
Now that more people are using mobile devices, theyre even more impatient with slow-loading pages. When theyre in the car or waiting in line at the grocery store, they simply dont take the time to wait for slow websites.
Find Out Your Website Speed
Fortunately, Google Analytics provides small business owners with tools to help you gauge your websites speed. To find out the speed of your small business website, log into Google Analytics and go to Site Speed Overview. This data will tell you how long it takes the average users to load your website.
You can also turn to Googles Page Speed Insights for a more precise calculation of your sites speed. Google measures website speed on a scale of 0 to 100; a score of 100 means that your website is lightning fast, but as long as your score is 85 or higher, Google considers it a high-performing website.
The great thing about Googles Page Speed Insights is that it provides detailed instructions for improving your websites speed. For instance, Google will tell you if you need to compress one of your website images to make the page load faster.
Of course, some of these items might be difficult for small business owners to execute without the help of experienced local marketing experts. Nevertheless, it is a valuable tool for anyone who wants to improve their website, whether youre working alone or with the help of a team of experts.
To learn more about taking advantage of Googles tools, check out our Google guide.
Faster Speed Leads to Better Search Rankings
Website speed is an important ranking factor for Google for both mobile and desktop searches. Dont wait another dayYou could be missing out on quality leads because people are coming to your site, getting impatient with the load time and leaving right away. Log into Google Analytics and check out the current speed of your website. If you dont have time to do it on your own, one of our marketing experts can do it for you for free. Simply fill out the form here.
This isn’t something I’ve really thought about. Other than when it frustrates me when someone elses site doesn’t load quickly. I’ll be checking out how my sites doing later today
Hi Chris,
Thank you for sharing. Actually, you are right. Having a faster speed website does helps in terms of business. For me, I don’t have much patience and thus, it is always good to have a fast loading website. More than 3 secs and I will just close it down. Haha!
Appreciate the write.
Reginald